Comparatively Speaking, That Is

"At this moment it appears to be the case that the public health risk is probably quite low. We understand radiation that has escaped from the plant is very small in amount," Gregory Hartl, a WHO spokesman, said (Nebehay, 3/13). "At least as of now, what we're looking at is rather more like Three Mile Island than Chernobyl," said David Brenner, director of the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University, the New York Times reports in an article examining the possible effects of the radiation leak. The radiation released from Chernobyl in 1986 "was about a million times the amount released from the partial core meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979, he said." Chernobyl resulted in a thyroid cancer epidemic and an uptick in leukemia cases, according to Brenner. After Three Mile Island, "There is no evidence that anybody at all got sick, even decades later," he said (Grady, 3/13).

...from WHO Reports On Risk From Radiation Exposure